This invention relates to removing material from a surface. More particularly, the invention relates to the selective removal of material from the surface of a substrate by irradiation without altering the physical properties of material to be left on the substrate that is underlying or adjacent to the material to be removed.
Effective removal of undesired material from the surface of a substrate is a critical aspect of many important materials processing and product fabrication processes. As described in the '165 application, undesired materials (which may also be considered as contaminants) include particles, unwanted chemical elements or compounds, and films or layers of material. Particles may be discrete pieces of matter ranging in size from submicrons to granules visible to the unaided eye. Undesired chemicals include any element or compound which, at the time at which the removal process is performed, is undesirable. For example, hydroxyl groups (--OH) may be a desired reaction promoter on the surface of a substrate at one stage of a process and may be an undesired contaminant at another stage. Films or layers of material may be organic, such as human body oil from fingerprints, paint, and epoxy, or inorganic, such as oxides of the substrate material or other inorganic materials to which the substrate has been exposed.
Such undesired materials may need to be removed to render the substrate more useful for its intended purpose. For example, in certain precise scientific measurement devices, accuracy is lost when optical lenses or mirrors in the devices become coated with microfine surface contaminants. Similarly in semiconductors, surface defects due to minor molecular contaminants often render semiconductor masks or chips worthless. Reducing the number of molecular surface defects in a quartz semiconductor mask by even a small amount can radically improve semiconductor chip production yields. Similarly, removing molecular surface contaminants, such as carbon or oxygen, from the surface of silicon wafers before circuit layers are deposited on the wafer or between deposition of layers significantly improves the quality of the computer chip produced.
Selective removal of layers of the substrate material may be done to form very small-scale structures on the substrate surface (so-called "nanostructures"). Material (whether substrate material, oxide layers, or other layers of material) may also be selectively removed in differing amounts across the surface of the substrate to changes the surface topography of the substrate (such as smoothing a rough surface).
Material processing equipment often requires treatment for removal of undesired material to prevent contamination of products processed by the equipment. For example, a significant portion of the undesired material that ultimately contaminates silicon wafers during production emanates from production apparatus such as process chambers in which the wafers are placed, quartz wafer boats used to hold wafers for passage through quartz furnace tubes (and the furnace tubes themselves), and pipes that conduct processing gas to the chambers. Accordingly, the level of wafer contamination experienced during the course of production can be significantly reduced by the periodic cleaning of such apparatus.
In general, any process used for removing material from a substrate should do so without affecting the physical properties of the (desired) material that remains. The physical properties that should remain unaffected can in general include crystalline structure, conductivity, density, dielectric constant, charge density, Hall coefficient, and diffusion coefficient for electrons/holes. In particular semiconductor applications (such as metal oxide semiconductor ("MOS"); field effect transistor ("FET"); and bipolar junction ("BJT")), the properties can include capacitance/area in MOS; junction capacitance; channel current in an FET, directed from drain to source; voltage from collector to base, emitter to base in a BJT; voltage from drain to source, gate to source in an FET; MOS threshold potential; MOS surface state charge/area; and storage delay time. Further, it may be undesirable to change the topography (such as the surface roughness) of the remaining material.
As described in detail in the '165 application, many techniques have been proposed (and are currently used) for removing undesired materials. These include wet chemical cleaning (RCA process), dilute HF, megasonic and ultrasonic, and supercritical fluid cleaning, UV and ozone cleaning, brush cleaning, vapor HF, laser-assisted liquid cleaning (including the Allen process and Tam process), surface melt, annealing, and ablation.
Another technique is plasma cleaning, which may be used to clean the process chambers of reactive ion etch (RIE) tools after a certain amount of processing (e.g. a certain number of wafers) is completed. The preferred plasma species are oxygen, carbon tetrachloride, and nitrogen, which can be used in various mass molar concentrations for cleaning optics and silicon surfaces. Electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) based plasmas are currently state of the art. The effectiveness of this type of cleaning is limited to particles--film removal appears to be difficult and damaging to the electrical parametrics.
Dry ice (CO.sub.2) cleaning (also known as snow cleaning and CO.sub.2 jet spray cleaning) is a method of delivering CO.sub.2 snow via a hand-held device having various orifices to clean a surface. This technique is limited by the solubility of the particle in the CO.sub.2 snow, e.g. if the particle is not soluble in CO.sub.2 then it will not be removed from the surface. Further, oxides and polymeric films cannot be removed using this cleaning technique.
All of these techniques suffer from some drawbacks, including: inability to remove very small particles; undesirable alteration of the underlying substrate's physical properties; consumption of large quantities of expensive materials such as ultrapure water and gases; and production of toxic waste products (such as HF acids).
Films, and in particular oxidation films, are a common, troublesome category of materials that need to be removed from a substrate. Most materials that are exposed to an oxygenated atmosphere (e.g., air) form a native oxide that coats the surface. Such oxide layers are typically a substantially continuous layer of molecules of the oxide material. In most cases, this native oxide layer is detrimental depending on how the substrate material will be used. One approach to this problem has been to maintain the substrate material in a vacuum to prevent oxide growth. Known techniques for removing oxide films include treating them with strong acids such as aqua regia, sulfuric acid and hydrofluoric acid.
In semiconductor fabrication, the removal of native oxide (silicon dioxide) from the silicon substrate is of great concern as technology geometries continue to get smaller. Current methods to remove the silicon dioxide employ liquid HF, and experiments are being undertaken with vapor phase halogens and vapor phase halogens in conjunction with UV radiation. B. Van Eck, S. Bhat, and V. Menon, "Vapor-phase etching and cleaning of SiO.sub.2," Proceedings, Microcontamination 92, (Santa Clara, Calif.; Oct. 27-30, 1992), p. 694; J. de Larios, W. Krusell, D. McKean, G. Smolinsky, B. Doris, and M. Gordon, "Gas-phase cleaning of trace metal and organic contaminants from wafers: Ultraviolet irradiated oxygen-based and chlorine-based chemistries," Proceedings, Microcontamination 92, (Santa Clara, Calif.; Oct. 27-30, 1992), p. 706; M. Miyashita, T. Tusga, K. Makihara, and T. Ohmi, "Dependence of surface microroughness of CZ, FZ, and EPI wafers on wet chemical processing," Journal of the Electrochemical Society, vol. 139 (8) 1992, p. 2133; and T. Ohmi, "ULSI reliability through ultraclean processing," Proceedings IEEE, vol. 81 (5), p. 716. Using halogen-based chemistry can damage adjacent circuitry since it is a gross, rather than pinpoint, method of removal.
Removal of surface oxides is also important in preparing metal substrates for the application of adhesives as an alternative to welding in aerospace, automotive and construction (building) applications. Removal of oxide films also has applications in reconditioning weathered metal surfaces and improving the grade of circulated coinage.
Another important treatment process is the creation of nanostructures (extremely small physical structures) on or in substrate materials, such as pressure transducers, accelerometers, atomic force microscope probes, and micromotors. One technique proposed for creation of nanostructures involves chemical etching in combination with masking techniques (useful in bulk micromachining where structural layers of material are built upon a wafer and then a sacrificial layer is etched away). J. Bryzaek, K. Peterson, and W. McCulley, IEEE Spectrum, May, 1994, p. 20. Another proposed technique involves the laser-focused deposition of material. J. J. McClelland, R. E. Scholten, E. C. Palm, and R. J. Celotta, "Laser-focused atomic deposition", Science, vol. 262, 5 Nov. 1993, p. 877.
Another important treatment process is planarization, to eliminate or reduce non-uniformities in the surface of a substrate. A commonly-used technique for planarization is chemical mechanical polishing (CMP), which uses proprietary slurry mixtures to grind the surface to a planar level through the use of polishing pads. This surface polishing provides the advantage of improved chip performance. CMP planarization is controlled by "etch stops" and by timing the process so that excessive polishing does not occur. This process produces large quantities of contaminants (residual from the slurry) and is very expensive (with an average cost of approximately $35 per wafer), which is attributable to the cost of the consumables such as slurry, water, pads, and brushes for brush cleaners. Another problem associated with CMP is removing the slurry residual from the wafer surface. Removal using brush cleaning, which is the current process, is efficient only to approximately 0.5 .mu.m particles. An additional drawback of the CMP planarization process is that it is not clusterable with other current cleaning technologies.
Effective removal of undesired material is particularly challenging when the surface of the substrate has a thin film coating of a desired material. Such thin films may have thicknesses of several Angstroms to tens of micrometers. It has been found that the apparatus and techniques described in the parent application are less than completely effective in treating some such substrates--at energy or power fluxes sufficient to effectively remove undesired material, the thin film coating may be damaged. When the flux is decreased to a level which is low enough to avoid damage, the removal of undesired material may be ineffective. Piezoelectric materials, including ferroelectric substances, have also been found to be difficult to treat.
Removal of undesired material from the inner surface of a relatively small closed shape (such as a tube) is more difficult because of the relative inaccessibility of the inner surface to the application of energetic photons from sources such as lasers. One solution to this problem is disclosed in the '039 application, in which photons and inert gas are conducted to the treatment surface by special apparatus. Although this solution offers many benefits, it would be preferable in some circumstances to remove undesired materials from the inner surface without using the relatively more complex apparatus disclosed in the '039 application. In particular, it would be preferable to be able to remove undesired material from the inner surface by application of radiation to the outer surface.
It is desirable in many applications to prepare a surface of a substrate for a processing step by removing contaminants (including undesired chemical species) from bond sites on the surface so that desired materials (other chemical species) may be more effectively chemisorbed.